


This paradise that had been built

by CertifiedPissWizard



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Like, and also so much yearning, but mostly its about the gay yearning ngl, but seriously, dont at me, i can post little a original fiction as a treat, i literally wrote this over 2 days, i was fucking possessed by yearning, i. may have quietly sobbed writing the kiss scene, its mostly just a mix of people learning to be happy, its psuedo-period piece time, mentions of pseudoperiod homophobia, nonbinary character written by nonbinary person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26369386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CertifiedPissWizard/pseuds/CertifiedPissWizard
Summary: The first thing to know about me, and one of the more important things is that I did not love my husband. William was a good man; I will admit this. I did not love him, though. I simply could not. I bore him two children, and I was a dutiful wife. I could not love him, though. I simply could not. I looked at him, and for all I could, I tried not to resent him. I tried to not resent this loveless marriage that I trapped myself in. I tried my hardest not to resent each time that I had to kiss him, to pretend to laugh at his jokes, to look at him and try and bring love into my eyes. All I could think of, however, was Frances. We had loved each other, a soft yet deep love. It was so gentle, the way we would touch each other’s skin, the way we looked at the other, the way we kissed.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	This paradise that had been built

The first thing to know about me, and one of the more important things is that I did not love my husband. William was a good man; I will admit this. I did not love him, though. I simply could not. I bore him two children, and I was a dutiful wife. I could not love him, though. I simply could not. I looked at him, and for all I could, I tried not to resent him. I tried to not resent this loveless marriage that I trapped myself in. I tried my hardest not to resent each time that I had to kiss him, to pretend to laugh at his jokes, to look at him and try and bring love into my eyes. All I could think of, however, was Frances. We had loved each other, a soft yet deep love. It was so gentle, the way we would touch each other’s skin, the way we looked at the other, the way we kissed.

Things must change, however. Her parents found out, as did mine, and we were forbidden the company of our other half. We were pushed to meet new men, over and over, and then we both were wed. We saw each other sometimes, at the parties some of the other women would throw in the neighborhood where we lived. It was an affluent place. We both married up, you see. We saw each other from across the room, and I could not help but imagine that the look in her eyes was the same quiet despair that haunted mine every moment that I did not attempt to force another look into them. We both were trapped in marriages to men that I at least could not love, she perhaps could, however, although I do not think that she had ever felt any sort of sentiments like that towards her Henry. She had expressed interest to some of the local boys in the past, I had known when we were young. She had told me this before we were together, when we talked to each other of our secrets as though they were something so terribly shameful.

I did not love my husband, so perhaps it was understandable for me to be pleased when he was drafted. I would be free from performing my wifely duties. I would be free to smile and laugh and engage in all of those ugly things, those impolite things that I could not do around him. I was his wife. I was not his friend. I was supposed to love him, but I was supposed to destroy myself to do so. I was supposed to be a ghost- to lose myself to his will. Then he was gone for the war. I still had to manage the affairs of the household and raise our children, of course, but I was free. I was free.

There was a piano in the house. I played it once, and then he walked in, my William did. He said that I played beautifully. I could not bear to play it anymore after that. It was meant to be for me- the music- the joy I felt when each note seemed to ring with my soul- and then this man I could not love entered into my moment. He looked at me, saw me in my ecstasy, and then he spoke. He shattered this peace I had found within a life that was more of a cage than anything else. Oh how I hated him in that moment. I was young and not yet destroyed by this life I had been forced into. I was not yet a shade of a person.

I sat down at the piano for the first time in years, my children following quietly in the manner that William taught them. How I wished they would laugh and scream and simply be inside this gilded cage of a house. I sat down at the piano, and pulled our youngest, a boy named John, barely four, onto the bench with me. He leaned into my side, and then I began to play. I had not heard any sound sweeter in years. I sung along with it- my voice was rusty and did not sound as it used to. Perhaps it is sinful, prideful of me to say, but in that moment I think even angels would have felt jealousy at the sound of my voice. It had never been sweeter, more clear. My voice broke often, but the music I produced with it, with that piano, felt on the same level as the greatest of composers, the greatest of pianists, the greatest of orchestras.

Perhaps it was horribly cruel of me, but in that moment I began to wait that he would never come back from the war. It was a feeling that stuck with me the whole of the war, even as I heard of all of the horrors that those soldiers experienced. I was free to be loud and joyful and ugly for the first time in years. I am glad that all of the help that had been contracted was let go, as William was unable to continue with his job during the war. There was a great deal of family money, and the business handled itself well enough. Still, money can only last so far. There was nobody to see me engaging in all of these ugly things, these impolite things, that I was now doing. Our children laughed and sung for the first time in their lives. They had been quiet, disciplined waifs. Elizabeth had been sent to boarding school, and grew more and more quiet as they taught her the manners she was supposed to use. No large laughs that seem to escape from the whole of your being- simply twittering laughs at the jokes the men around you make. No singing unless requested. Simply ghosting around raising children while your husband does everything. No reading to much or reading certain books. That is a sign of wrongness.

I taught her the opposite, kept her away from that school for all that it might cause problems should William come back. I wished he never would. We ran around the gardens. We rolled in the mud. We tried to maintain them for all our lack of knowledge. The gardener was gone as well. The vegetables somehow survived our ineptitude, as did the flowers. The garden endured, and it grew to be as wild and free as we were. Somehow manicured grasses and flowers turned large and attracted so many birds and bees and butterflies. Of course, the ladies in the ladies group disapproved. They spoke harshly of _my_ garden, and they expressed distaste at how wild it was. They spoke harshly of how wild and free I was becoming. They suggested hysteria, and they wished me husband would return soon to force sense into me. I could not bring myself to care, though. The garden was mine and my music was mine and my laughter was mine and I could read whatever books I wanted. They could express distaste all they wanted. My jailer was gone, and I freed myself from this prison.

The war continued on in the background, knowledge slipping in through this golden haze that covered over my life. Rationing was encouraged, of course. They would not require such a thing, but they pushed it. I engaged in it. The garden did well. It flourished as I and my children did. The tomatoes grew bright and juicy, and the cucumbers grew more quickly than they had before. The carrots grew and the cabbage and the beans and the squash. We feasted on fresh produce each night. The war could not touch us here, even as those around fretted over it. John grew to read more and more books, and Elizabeth sought to learn as many languages as she could. I read book after book on gardening. I bought materials and tools and we started to build a coop. We could have birds and eggs and fertilizer for the garden. It was challenging to try and build this ourselves, but John handed nails and Elizabeth tools. I put the frame together from patterns I found. It was lifted up. William had not written, had never written. I hoped he never would. I would hate to watch the garden be tamed, the books to be returned to their shelves, the coop dismantled and our chickens sold.

I hated the idea of it. For all that we are supposed to love our neighbors, for all that a wife is supposed to love and uplift and glorify her husband, I could not help but pray for his demise. I knew he likely would live, and this paradise that had been built out of what had once been a gilded cage would be dismantled.

Frances came to one of the ladies meetings. Her eyes were dry. Her husband was dead. For the first time in over a decade I touched her. A loose, short hug. It was to supposedly offer sympathy. It was to touch her, to feel her warmth. I ached. I was free, and yet, and yet. I had missed her warmth so dearly, and even as I touched her I missed it still. It reminded me of nights hiding in the gardens, curled in a safe spot behind some hedges. Our arms pressed together, a point of heat and grounding as we stared at the stars and spoke and existed. Oh, how I suddenly missed those days. I missed those stars. I missed that sky. I could still look up at the stars and the sky, but they are simply there now. In the days when we were together, before our marriages, they were our stars in our sky. I ached so deeply for a moment, a realization of an empty piece in this paradise, this wild freedom that had bloomed with the garden, with music, with laughter. I ached for the force of missing her touch even as she was right there and I held her but for a moment. “I am sorry for your loss,” I told her. It sounded false. I could not help but feel a sudden horrid joy at this. She smiled at me, and I could not help but imagine that joy was also being felt by her. Then the moment passed and I had to walk away from the person who had been so dear to me for so many years.

There was a melancholy that hung over me that day. My children noticed, of course, and when they asked I found myself throwing what caution I still held to the wind. I told them of my Frances, the first and only and most important love I had ever felt second to my love for them. I spoke to them of the glow of her smile and the scent of her hair when we would hold each other and the shape of her laugh. I told them that she was so beautiful and smart and kind and stunning, and I missed her so terribly. Elizabeth looked at me for a moment, my darling daughter, and said, “So it’s okay then? To be like this?”

I pulled her close, and I whispered into her hair, “Yes. Yes. Yes it is. It is.” John wrapped himself around the both of us and promised if anyone was ever cruel over it he would stop them. Elizabeth cried and I cried and Jon sat there with us. There was no understanding, not yet.

The war continued in the backdrop, and Elizabeth was 15 all of a sudden instead of the 11 she was when the war began. John was 8. He played with other children sometimes in the garden while I watched over them. One day John walked up to me and asked me to explain what it felt like, being a woman or being a man. John didn’t understand. I tried to explain. John looked at me and said that he didn’t think he was either. I wrapped him in my arms and asked if there was anything I could do to grant comfort. My darling child, my John whispered that maybe just maybe they could be a they for a while. I could never deny them anything, not really. My heart had grown and changed and there was love in it again and how could I not love my darling John for all I could not understand this part of them? How could I not love my daughter when Elizabeth nervously brought home a girl she was seeing to introduce her to her family? The girl was named Ethel, and she looked at Elizabeth like Elizabeth had hung the stars in the sky.

The war was drawing to a close and I felt dread, not only for myself but for my darling children. What if John had finally found comfort in this aspect of their being, a sense of how and who they were, only to have it stolen away by William? What if Elizabeth would lose this thing she had gained with her Ethel? What if I would lose my children and all this joy that I had gained? What if? What if? What if? These questions haunted me, and they haunted my dreams. I could find no rest, not truly.

The day the war ended a letter arrived. William decided to leave when he was drafted, yes, but it was to flee rather than to go and fight in a war. He had fallen in love with Winston, our gardener before the war. He spoke of how he had loved to watch Winston tend to the garden and to make things grow so neatly. He apologized, of course, said that while he still loved me dearly he could not help but love Winston more than he could love me or John or Elizabeth. I cried when I received the letter. Freedom from this axe hanging over my head was the most glorious and terrifying thing that I had ever felt. I froze for a moment, could not figure out what to do now. Of course, when my darling children found out they provided a suggestion that I could barely even dream of. I was free, after all, and Frances was free. They asked why I could not simply talk to her, could not simply ask her to be with me again, after all these years and all of these changes. I listened and thought and thought and did not dare to hope. Yet I still wondered, though. What if I was brave enough? I could not help but ask myself.

She walked up to me at the ladies meeting, when I said that my husband had died during the war- a lie of course. It was a necessary one, though. I could not bear the looks and scrutiny that this abandonment would provide. She comforted me the same way I had comforted her those years ago. It was a short swift hug and an apology. There was a look in her eyes that I could no longer place. I could not help but miss the days that I could. She joked that as the only two widows we could perhaps gather to discuss the pain that we felt over the losses of our darling husbands.

She had so many times proven herself to be the braver of the two of us, and this was quite simply proving that once again. Except, she didn’t reach out to me. We drank tea and talked of mundane things, and we danced around the past and the important things. Sometimes she almost looked jealous at these little meetings when I arrived with flowers in my hair that I grew in the greenhouse that was built. Sometimes I would speak of the business that had always belonged to the family I married into. I was getting more and more involved in it as time went by. It was good, I told her, having something to do beyond my gardening. John was doing well, I told her. They were doing wonderfully in mathematics, and they’d developed quite the interest in history. Elizabeth had taken to writing poetry in so many different languages. I’d helped her look over some of them before she passed them off to Ethel- love poems after love poems. I practically glowed with pride in my children.

Frances was sad so much of the time. She looked like she wanted something, but she didn’t know what. Maybe there was a hint of fear in her gaze as well. It isn’t like it wasn’t so terribly easy to recall why we were forced apart, but we weren’t children anymore. Two widows who were childhood friends could easily live in the same house. It’s such a bother keeping up a large one, after all, and it’s always good to have extra hands with the children. I offered. She said no. I smiled and placed my hand on hers and said I understood. Because I did, I did. The fear and the sorrow and the empty place that you can’t quite fill- the all consuming void that appears when you have to hide yourself away- the void that appears when you must sever pieces of yourself for your own safety. I understood, and I ached for her, and I ached for missing her.

Somehow I convinced her to go from teas to walks in the garden. I held her hand for the first time in so terribly long. It felt like coming home after over a decade away- Odysseus coming home and seeing Penelope after so many years- the sudden ache that hits home like an arrow through so many axe heads.

I couldn’t help but to recall how we slowly went from friends to secret lovers. She pulled outside to look at the stars and walk through the gardens and talked to me about anything and everything. Her hair glinted so stunningly in the sun. We discussed books and classes and how we dreaded becoming what we were supposed to be. Then, one day, months into this blossoming friendship, she grasped my hands in hers, moved her face so close to mine I could feel her breath dancing across my lips. “Ruth.” I didn’t know whether to focus on her hands or her voice or the feel of her breath on my skin. “You are a very dear friend to me. May I ask you a question?” I don’t quite recall my response. It never felt as important as the rest of that moment. “May I kiss you?” I leaned the rest of the way in. I couldn’t find any other way to answer- the idea of any more speech in that moment offended me so deeply.

I pulled her into the grass on one of these walks- we were walking in my garden rather than hers, and spring was coming into itself. Flowers were pushing their heads up through the earth. I could hardly help the impulse, despite the fact that I was hardly some fresh young thing anymore. She landed on top of me. The crushing warmth of her on me was so terribly familiar and so terribly strange. I started to unpin her hair while she still seemed to be in shock. “What are you doing?” she asked. I leaned in, and in a soft breath whispered into her ear that I wanted to braid flowers into her hair if that was acceptable. “Yes.” Her voice was almost uncertain.

Her hair was soft and much longer than I’d expected. There were hints of grey in it. I knew her mother had gone grey early. It felt strange to see these colors in Frances’s hair. I took some blooms from the camellia bush. They were large pink blooms. Longing. I took some jasmine blooms as well. Love is what they mean. So many flowers mean love. I slip in some clover as well. Think of me. In the end her hair was a beflowered mess. My throat ached some as well. I pulled her into singing with me- soft and gentle songs- songs that could almost be love songs. It was a strange reversal, truly, to be the one trying to seek a first kiss from her rather than she from me. It didn’t really matter much, though. What mattered was that even when I was done braiding her hair her body was so close to mine. I had slipped forward at some point, wrapped my arms around her, my head on her shoulder. We rested there until John ran out of the house saying that Elizabeth decided to try and cook again. She stood and helped me up. “We’d best go see what’s happening so as to stop any problems,” I said ostensibly to John, but my eyes did not leave Frances’s eyes the whole time. She made her apologies and left. I nodded in easy acquiescence for all that I wished she would stay.

She avoided me for a week after that. She would cast glances my way, but the second she caught me looking back she would look away. I felt the novelty sharply when I reached out to her once more, asking for some help with the garden. She looked at me so strangely. She agreed, for all that she acted distantly while we planted new flowers into the earth, so close to each other. We weren’t touching, however- and that short distance felt like an uncrossable divide. Somehow, for all we didn’t move our faces close to the dirt I ended up with some on mine. Frances noticed and held out a hand in an aborted movement to wipe it away. I leaned in. I have never claimed to be a strong woman or a woman of complex tastes. My face touched her hand, my eyelids closed for a moment, and then she wiped the dirt away. She backed away. We continued gardening, and what had been a companionable silence turned distant and sharp. I invited her in afterwards, to cool off and refresh ourselves. She left.

Elizabeth and John were, of course, absolutely incorrigible. They alternated between mocking my lack of luck with my darling Frances and coming up with hairbrained schemes to try and get her to take notice. Elizabeth was now 17, and with the brashness of youth thought that waiting like this was pointless. I did not know how to explain to her that that youthful bravery we had was such a contrast to the bravery I felt now. She and I had been brash- we took risk after risk not caring what may come. That split us apart for years. It burnt us both, and so patience was the best way. No, Elizabeth didn’t believe in that at all. Things between her and Ethel were so much easier than the way my Frances and I had travelled, in part, I suppose, that was due to my making as many places possible on the property a refuge for them. In part perhaps the offer of sanctuary should Ethel need it.

John, of course, was ten, and they simply wondered why I could not tell her. They thought that I should simply walk up to Frances and tell her that I still loved her so deeply that I ached with it. As time went on and on that idea became more and more appealing. The distance between her and I was so short, and yet it felt almost insurmountable. What had once felt like being close to heaven, like a homecoming after so many years of distance, grew more far apart in my mind. I found myself missing her in the middle of my conversations with her once more.

I asked her about books. Had she read any interesting ones of late? She deflected. I persisted in asking questions and trying to reach out. Sometimes I would pull her into conversation about one of the things she used to be so passionate about. She would go on and on until she caught herself. Then I would once again be trapped away from her behind this polite distance. We were back to those stilted teas, propriety all but imprisoning us, keeping us away from those conversations that I so longed to have- that the look in her eyes suggested she so longed to have.

There was a cliff a good drive away from the house where she and I would watch the sky when we were younger. The stars were so clear and plentiful there. We came together there in many ways. Looking back on it it felt so strange. The way that everything felt so sharply different, not yet poisoned by our separation, our marriages to my William and her Henry. Things were different. Things changed. I asked her to go there with me, to go on a walk, during the middle of one of our teas that years ago felt like an olive branch. She looked at me, straight in the eyes, and there are no words that can describe the desolation in that gaze. She wanted to ask me something in that moment, although I have never been sure what. I just know that that question would have been absolutely heartbreaking. “Please, Frances. I do so dislike the idea of going alone, but I desire to walk that path again.” I grasped her two hands. “Please.” Something fragile escaped into my voice. I would have waited for decades for her, I knew then and knew it before and after.

She pulled her hands away. “I cannot. I’m sorry, Ruth. I- I simply can’t.” She told me to leave, and then she began to sob. I hated myself for following her wishes. I left, though, and when I was out of her eyesight, out of the range of her hearing, I, too, began to sob. I understood, is the thing. Sometimes I had wondered if not for my two beautiful children if I would never have healed as I have. I have always been so terribly afraid of that answer.

We had tea the next week. I did not mention the cliff. She did not, either.

Every time something pulled the two of us close to each other she pulled herself apart. Elizabeth quietly resented her for it. John thought it was tragically romantic. I thought that somehow with each year, even as our youth faded, she grew more and more beautiful. I could now be close with her, even if separated from her by a polite distance, and I memorized the growth of each new wrinkle, each new line.

I persuaded her into my garden again, one day. We strolled together, slowly, through the grasses. One of the chickens walked up to me. I picked it up, held its warm body to mine. I asked her if she wanted to pet it. She did, and a look of awe crossed over her face. God how I loved her, how I always will. She looked almost overjoyed to simply stroke a bird. The sun caught the stray hairs around her face, granting her a halo. Her crows feet stretched, giving the impression of her being infinitely more happy than I think she’d been in a while. Her dress was long and white, and it swayed its way through the grasses. The great master artists of the past couldn’t have ever dreamed of a more beautiful person, a more beautiful model or muse. My lips curled into a small, almost secret smile.

She asked questions, suddenly, about my chickens. I was so terribly glad to speak about them instead of the inanities that those social pressures that had forced us apart in the first place enforced upon us even now, two decades later. While I spoke of them, gesturing as one does when possessed by a mixture of knowledge and interest in a topic, I, on impulse, reached out and grasped one of her hands in mine. It felt cold. It felt even more cold when she pulled her hand out of mine, leaving that hand floating free in the air. “I need to go.” I watched Frances leave. Sometimes it felt like that was all I ever did with her these days- reaching out and watching her leave.

I walked up to that cliff alone. I laid down on the grass alone. The stars weren’t easy to see anymore. The crash of water on the rocks was too quiet. There was an empty space on the grass next to me. There was a missing laugh, a missing warmth that almost burned. There was something so terribly lonely about staring up at the sky. I was so terribly small in that moment, the world and sky spinning around me, larger than I could ever comprehend. What was I in the face of that? I was me. I was the mother of Elizabeth and John, and I was probably going to be the future mother-in-law of Ethel. I was someone who had loved Frances for so long, who had ached at every moment she held herself away from me like she insisted on. I was someone who had chickens and a garden and a piano.

I could not help but feel tired of waiting, and yet I could not comprehend the idea of loving someone other than Frances- the woman I had loved from a distance, from across a room, from hearing small talk from, for so many years. She was the woman I had loved so closely when we were younger. I could still remember the feel of her hands on my body and mine on hers. I could still almost feel the press of her lips to mine. I could not wait any longer, and yet I could not move on. The idea of seeking that out? Of turning my back on this deeply consuming love I had felt for years? It was reprehensible to me.

I had wondered if things would be different now, since William and Henry were dead and we were free. They weren’t. Not really. Not truly.

There was a gap that I did not know how to bridge.

I laid out there on that cliff all night, staring up at the sky, feeling the itch of the grass against my skin. I was going to ruin my dress. I could not possibly have cared less in that moment, in the whole of that entire night.

When dawn spread across the sky in that slow gentle way it does, I pushed myself up from the earth. When I turned my Frances was there. “Frances.”

“Ruth.”

I found myself walking towards her, even though I knew for all that she reciprocated my feelings and had nothing holding her back she would still shoot me down. When I was close enough, I leaned up, stood on my toes, and I did my best to be brave. I did my best to be brave in that way I had learned how to be, in the way that I had been as a child, in the way that Frances had been when she had asked me to kiss her the first time, in the way Elizabeth had been in bringing Ethel home, in the way that John was when they told me they were just them and nothing else. I reached out for all of that bravery, and tried my best to be so much bigger than the speck that I am. I placed a hand on the side of her face, leaned in, and in an echo of words that she had said to me all those years ago, I said, “Frances, you are a very dear friend to me. May I ask you a question?” I leaned in closer, and I breathed out onto her lips, “May I kiss you?”

Maybe this unnatural bravery I had pulled into myself in that moment was contagious, because she didn’t pull back. Maybe I simply needed to be far more direct than I had been. I don’t know, not have I cared to find out. The why she didn’t pull back this time isn’t the important part. The important part is the response she breathed out. “Yes.” Then we were kissing, arms wrapped around each other as the sun continued its climb into the sky, some of those first proper rays of light haloing us. For all that I have not been party to so many of this kisses that the world has seen, I can say with absolute certainty that this was the greatest kiss of them all.

It was the culmination of twenty years of longing, of waiting, of being separated by mere inches and yet endlessly wide chasms. “Ruth. Ruth. Ruth,” she whispered between each kiss. Our faces were wet, although it was quite impossible to tell which one of us was crying. “I am so terribly sorry. Ruth. Ruth. My Ruth. I missed you so. Ruth, my Ruth, my darling, precious Ruth. Oh, how I don’t deserve you.”

“You deserve the world. My Frances.”

“The person you have grown into. I could never hope to match that, my dearest Ruth. I don’t want to pull you down, drag you back into the shape I have been formed into. I could not dream of that. I can’t-“

I leaned in again, “You won’t.” I kissed her again. “If anything,” I told her, tears streaming down my face, voice cracked from this moment I’d yearned for all this time, “you need to worry about me corrupting you.” She smiled, let out a wet laugh. People have spoken of heaven. They have spoken of the beauty of angels. They have spoken of the presence of the Lord and of golden streets. They are all wrong.

Heaven is, I thought then and still think, being held by my Frances, and laughing and singing, and spending time with my children, and stopping Elizabeth from burning the house with her cooking, and watching Ethel look at Elizabeth with the same sort of love I have always felt for my Frances. It is standing under a bower that my family has made with my Frances. John, for all that they are not a minister, holds out a book and makes up their own words. Since this cannot be an official wedding, they said, they shall firmly refuse to use any of the words traditional weddings have.

“Will you be there for each other? Hold each other close, and not push each other away? In sickness and health and Elizabeth trying to burn down the kitchen again?”

“I resent that remark!”

“Settle down, dear.”

“Thank you, Ethel. So? Ma, Frances? Do you?”

“I do.” Frances’s voice sounded so clear, so certain. “I will. I will.”

“Yes.”

“You may now kiss the bride.”

And we did kiss each other. Quite a bit. And we’ll do that quite a bit more over however many decades we will still have by each other’s sides.


End file.
